Often the only way to leave the maras is over one’s own dead body. Fortunately this is only a scene from a play of the youth group from Tonaca, El Salvador. But although it’s only fake blood spilling out on the floor, and the marero is actually a young woman and the whole plot merely invented, the young people are still re-enacting their life. It’s about domestic and everyday violence, about delinquent, violent street gangs – the so-called maras – and about social and economic problems.
Their families – especially their mothers – are in the audience, who are concerned about their children, since Tonaca offers them only little perspective for the future. Many adolescents join the maras. The women of Tonaca, who are by now organised in a women’s group, have convinced their children to found an alternative youth group and provided them with a room for their meetings. Without further ado, the young people turned the old shack into a theatre.
During a regional meeting of all AWO International Central American partner organisations Christiane Schulte, AWO International co-ordinator, and representatives of those organisations attended the extraordinary of Tonaca – and joined the crowd in its rapturous applause for the committed young people.
